Bad Days – Break Me Down
Getting angry isn’t really clever. And maybe that’s one of the reasons it is so frowned upon to express it in polite company. The other part that bugs people, of course, is the unpredictability of angry people. Somebody gets up and smashes a flower pot, knocks a chair over and shoots at the top of their lungs. All of this might be natural, according to psychologists, but it is unsettling to any of the people watching.
Now, the folks that usually get angry know it. Most of them try to hide it. The clever ones try to ear themselves out and get rid of the anger in a less destructive fashion. And nearly none of them goes home to write a long dissertation on anger. Very few even attempt to put in a pop song and when they do, it sounds contrived.
Bad Days are a new band writing guitar pop songs that have the kind of pretty, clever melodies that demand to be whistled on the way to work. And, despite the fact that they already have this going for them, they also have some anger issues that they deal with through a hilarious ode to love and self-loathing, “Break Me Down.” This sounds like someone breaking a flower pot and knocking a chair over, but in the nicest, least offensive way. Bad Days produce honest, fun pop songs about terrible moments.
Lorie – Find Your Way
The system that the music industry had concocted back when it could routinely still provide bands and musical artists with fame and fortune clearly flowed. It’s not only the fact that, eventually, just like trying your luck in a casino for too long, the artists ended up broke again. The worst thing is that the artists, as their careers progressed, had nothing left to tell their audience.
The fourth or fifth album in a famous band’s discography is like a marriage that has run out of love. There are songs, they’re played and produced by well paid employees. But nobody seems to care about them.
A good deal of this was because that the musicians who “made it” found themselves locked in expensive hotels, not knowing what regular folks ever did with their lives. Take that away, and you have no songs.
Lorie’s “Find Your Way” is built on old-school pop-rock values. There’s a real warmth about the song, a real attempt to connect with listeners on their level. You better enjoy this before Lorie gets too big and starts forgetting fans while setting the world. Maybe it doesn’t have to work that way. Some artists do their work because they notice too many things that they wouldn’t want to go to waste and because they need to tell those stories to someone who might really listen. Lorie seems to be that way.
